About Cactus Watch

Phoenix Fire publishes every active call to a public dashboard. Most people never see it because the dashboard isn't designed for phones, doesn't filter to your neighborhood, and uses dispatch codes a civilian can't read. Cactus Watch fixes those three things.

What it does

You open the app and you see what Phoenix Fire is responding to right now. A vehicle crash on I-10. A working structure fire on McDowell. A mountain rescue at Camelback. Each row tells you the kind of call, where, when it came in, and which units are responding. That's the entire product on the free tier, and that's intentional.

What it doesn't do

• It doesn't replace 911. If you have an emergency, call 911.
• It doesn't notify you. The free tier shows what's happening; it doesn't ping your phone. Custom proximity alerts come in the paid tier later, and only with your explicit permission.
• It doesn't track you. We don't ask for location, contacts, or notifications until features actually need them.
• It doesn't show you names, photos, or anything personally identifying. Phoenix's feed contains intersections, not addresses of victims.

Where the data comes from

The City of Phoenix Fire Department publishes a real-time map of active incidents at maps.phoenix.gov, refreshed every minute. The City makes this data available under its Open Data Policy. We poll the City's public endpoint every 60 seconds, cache the result on our own server, and serve it to your phone. This way, thousands of users opening the app at the same time hit our cache, not the City's server.

We add small enhancements to make the data civilian-readable: Phoenix's 962 code becomes Vehicle Crash, STR becomes Structure Fire, and so on. The underlying location, time, and unit information is exactly what dispatch published.

Why we built it

Because situational awareness shouldn't require a police scanner, a Twitter feed, or a journalism degree. Most Phoenix residents discover that a fire is on their street when they smell smoke or hear sirens — five to fifteen minutes after dispatch knew about it. With Cactus Watch, that window narrows to as little as a minute. Not because we are doing anything special, but because Phoenix has been publishing this data publicly for years and nobody made it usable on a phone.

Who built it

Cactus Watch is independently developed in 2026 by a small team out of Arizona. We are not affiliated with the City of Phoenix, the Phoenix Fire Department, or any government agency. We support transparent public-safety data and operate under each agency's published open-data terms.

How we keep the lights on

Server costs run about $22/month on a single DigitalOcean droplet. The free tier is genuinely free with no ads and no data sale. When the paid tier launches (custom alerts, faster refresh, multi-city expansion to Mesa and Tucson), it will run somewhere around $4.99/month and pays for the additional infrastructure plus development time.

Coming next

• Multi-city expansion. Mesa, Tempe, Tucson, Glendale, Scottsdale — wherever a public CAD feed exists.
• Scanner-derived transcripts. For agencies without a public CAD feed, we transcribe the radio dispatch directly. Slower but covers gaps.
• Custom alerts. "Tell me when something happens within two miles of my house." Opt-in only.

None of these features are required to start. The launch promise is one screen of useful information, and that already works today.